It’s year-in-review time in the publishing world, the hallowed season during which print journalists forgo researching and developing actual features in favor of throwing together lists of The Stories That Touched Our Hearts, thereby freeing up their time for more important things like postponed Christmas shopping and the swilling of ‘nog. I sympathize with the instinct — if I thought I could get away with The Most Intriguing Tomato Nation Essays Of 2002, I’d chop together a retrospective, upload a MIDI file of “Only Time” to ensure the proper atmosphere of self-satisfied nostalgia, and take two weeks off. Alas, The Year In TN did not include anything as succulent as a syrupy wedding in New Mexico, a series of bar brawls, or the acquisition of a fugly haircut and a personality disorder, and because I haven’t rushed out onto a hotel balcony and dangled Hobey over the railing with a napkin over his head in the last three hundred and sixty-five days, I wouldn’t feel comfortable following the year-end template of entertainment journalism. I do, however, feel perfectly at ease ridiculing one of the practitioners of said template. I speak, of course, of Entertainment Weekly‘s Jim “The Joke Killer” Mullen.

For those of you not familiar with the name, Jim Mullen writes a diligently anti-funny “column” called “Jim Mullen’s Hot Sheet” which appears in every issue of EW. A recent piece on Fametracker provides a succinct and delightfully dismissive précis of the principal reasons why Mullen sucks; basically, he’s neither funny nor timely, relying instead on priggish one-liners presumably intended for a Catskills audience of the late nineteen-fifties. Wing Chun compares Mullen’s editorials to the oft-reviled “comic” strip “The Family Circus,” primarily because of their format and placement in the magazine, but the similarity goes farther than that. “The Family Circus” is annoying, “The Family Circus” is dated, and “The Family Circus” aims at humor and misses by light years — all hallmarks of the average Mullen column. And then there’s the fact that, as the Timothy Olyphant character says in Go, many of us read “The Family Circus” compulsively in spite of ourselves, even though we know it’s only going to piss us off simply by virtue of existing: “It’s always there, in the lower right hand corner, just waiting to suck.” I have the same problem with “Hot Sheet.” I try to flip past it quickly, because I know its crappiness will only anger me, but inevitably, one of the bolded items catches my eye, and then I read it, and then I grunt, “Shut up, Mullen,” and then I read another one that’s even less amusing or relevant, and then I shout, “Shut up, Mullen,” and then I turn the page, but by that time, it’s too late. By that time, Mullen’s ineptitude has sullied the entire magazine-reading experience for me.

Mullen’s writing isn’t funny, but that in and of itself doesn’t bother me. I read EW to get information about pop culture, not to tickle my funny bone. No, what bothers me is that, with barn-sized targets in front of him and a week to steady his aim each time, Mullen’s writing should be funny, and it isn’t. Even worse, Mullen obviously thinks it’s funny — at times, you almost can hear him chortling with pride at his own “wit” — and it isn’t. A zinger is tougher to execute than it looks, a string of them even tougher, but the man can’t zing at all; he just keeps acting like he can, and it’s irritating.

The “Hot Sheet” from the December 13, 2002 issue constitutes a typical Mullen outing, with pretty much every shade in the unfunny spectrum on display — dated references, poor punchline set-ups, non-sequiturs, and bits ganked from Leno monologues. Let’s examine them in more detail, shall we?

“1. Britney Spears She’s bailed out of her Manhattan hash house, Nyla. Avoiding it was taking up, like, way too much of her time.”

Vintage Mullen. Thinking he’s Raymond Chandler, he gets in his own way almost immediately with the coy alliteration of “hash house,” which I imagine he intended sneeringly but which just comes off as anachronistic. “Eatery” would have worked better. The second line is a passable one-liner if he leaves out the “like,” because it’s 1) a comment on Britney’s youth/vapidity, I guess, but that’s not relevant here and 2) it’s too easy anyway.

“2. Nicolas Cage & Lisa Marie Presley It’s been more than two weeks. Has either one of them remarried yet?”

I feel for Mullen here, actually — you’d have to get up pretty early in the morning to find a wisecrack about that story that isn’t ultra-predictable — but the wisecrack Mullen chose isn’t ultra-predictable so much as kind of ignorant. The only impetuous marriage Cage is really known for is the one to Presley, and Presley isn’t more weird and/or stupid with the marriages than hasty…it just doesn’t quite work.

“3. Eminem’s house The bidding is up to $11 million for Slim Shady’s $90,000 boyhood shack. The surprise is that Warren Buffett and Bill Gates both want it.”

Huh? If that’s true, it’s not particularly funny. If that’s not true, the joke makes no sense.

“4. Courteney Cox She tells InStyle that dropping Arquette from her name doesn’t mean anything. He’s thinking of dropping it too.”

Mullen might have wrung a “heh” out of that if he’d set it up properly. It’s a good zinger, but coming after “doesn’t mean anything,” it reads a bit strangely. The foundation is there, though, for once, so I’ll give it to him.

“5. Nobel Peace Prize ceremony Would it kill them to give a few to movie stars and athletes? Then they could get some TV coverage.”

Because that’s what winning a Nobel Prize is about, in the end — getting on TV. I suppose that maybe he’s aiming for facetious here, but he’s not good enough at it for me to tell. So, just in case: Shut up, Mullen.

“6. Analyze That Mobster Robert De Niro must find a real job when he gets out of prison. But what’s he qualified to be other than an Enron executive?”

Um…author of EW‘s humor column “Robert De Niro’s Hot Sheet”? Oh, wait — that’s not a real job. Because, at a real humor-column job, your hack ass gets fired for that moldy Enron joke, especially when you’ve got at least half a dozen better jokes you could have used instead. “I hear the Soprano crew has an opening,” say, or “I hear there’s good money in green-lighting sequels at Warner Brothers.”

“7. Rosie The ex-talk-show host and her partner have a new baby girl. The shower will be at Home Depot.”

As Wing Chun so aptly put it, “BECAUSE THEY’RE LESBIANS!!!! HA HA HA HA! And you know how lesbians love home improvement stores, right?” And as I so aptly put it two items ago, “Shut up, Mullen.”

“8. Cleavage A pseudo-anthropological show about human breasts on A&E. Or as they’d like to be known, T&A&E.”

It’s a little too easy, but he really only had one way to go with that and he did it fairly deftly, so I’ll allow it.

“9. Adaptation A screenwriter hired to adapt a book winds up writing himself into the film. Hasn’t that been done to death?”

Jeez, talk about leaving me open. Heh. Also: The hell? What is he talking about? See my comments on #3. If he’s sincere, I don’t get it. If he’s joking, it’s not funny.

“10. James Cameron The Titanic director explores the sunken WWII German battleship Bismarck. Did his rubber ducky sink in the bathtub when he was a kid or something?”

Okay, that’s pretty good, especially for Mullen. It’s the obvious one-liner, but not so obvious or played that it’s not funny. Not a knee-slapper or anything, but it’s effective.

“11. ‘The Chanukah Song Part 3’ The Adam Sandler novelty hit is becoming a holiday classic. It’s putting pressure on the dogs barking ‘Jingle Bells’ to come up with something new.”

Another quintessential Mullen offering — he takes too long to set it up and has to go too far to get where he’s going. I will say in his defense that that’s tough material to zing, because the joke is right there, but it’s hard to get in and out of it quickly, and I can’t come up with a better punchline than Mullen’s off the top of my head. Given time, maybe I could whip a “Grandma Got Run Over By A Reindeer” punchline into fighting shape, or one about hoping Mr. Deeds 3 isn’t also in the pipeline, but a joke about that in the short format probably isn’t happening…which Mullen should have realized, and left it alone.

“12. Billboard Music Awards What is it with musicians and awards? It’s like they win a prize if they wake up before noon one day.”

Okay, so…musicians tend to sleep late. That’s…the joke, then? The whole thing? I don’t get it. I see the angles he’s trying to work here — the rock-star lifestyle angle, and the “musicians have a lot of awards ceremonies” angle — and if he’d picked one of them and stuck with it, he might have gotten an actual joke out of it, but I just don’t get what he means. I mean, did the Billboard Music Awards take place in the morning? Because if they didn’t, that punchline makes no sense.

“13. Liam Gallagher The Oasis singer got some teeth knocked out in a Munich bar brawl. But it happened too late to get him nominated for an award this year.”

Oy. I guess that’s a callback to the previous item, but it doesn’t really work because he uses the callback right away. Well, it really doesn’t really work because it’s not funny, and neither is the original joke, but going back to it so soon doesn’t help. And here again is another instance where Mullen had a sizable selection of punchlines to choose from — British-teeth humor, “a cage match with Russell Crowe would do wonders to fix that hair,” riffing on Corey Haim’s molar auction on eBay, you name it. When the universe hands me a Gary Oldman joke, I take it. Not Mullen.

At times, as I’ve said, I can sympathize with Mullen, because he has certain pop-cult events he’s obligated to comment on, and not all of them lend themselves easily to the one-two set-up. But at other times, it really seems as though he just uses the first comeback he thinks of, even if it’s weak, instead of mulling it over or working on it at all — and here, it seems like he actually worked to make it less funny. I can’t think of another reason, with all the Oasis song titles the average EW reader would know and all the celebrity brawls in the news recently, why Mullen would have chosen that punchline when just about any other punchline, even one in a foreign language, is funnier. Well, unless he sucks. Which he does. So I guess that’s that, then.

“14. White truffles Due to a worldwide market glut, they’ve dropped to less than $1,000 a pound this season. Great news for people who like them on their SpaghettiOs and Spam.”

Eh. I don’t know. I think an Olive Garden crack would have worked a little bit better there, but the punchline is almost irrelevant; the subject matter itself just isn’t that funny. I guess you do what you have to do if you really want to make the Spam joke, but the Spam joke is so, so played — and who cares in the first place? This ain’t Gourmet, buddy. Bad choice of material.

“15. Taken The Sci Fi Channel is airing the Spielberg alien-abduction tale on 10 consecutive weeknights. How did they know sci-fi fans wouldn’t have other plans?”

The thing about mean-spirited humor is that, um, it’s customarily humorous. I’ve got no moral quibble with Mullen busting on the sci-fi fandom, because while it’s one of the cheaper shots in the comic arsenal, at least it’s reliable. But there’s no humor here, and as a result the meanness is ineffectual as well. The construction of the punchline itself is mostly to blame; it’s too cute and vague. Just come out and say, “Good thing sci-fi fans have nothing better to do.” But that doesn’t really work as a punchline either, because in the TiVo era — in the post-VCR era, really — you have to work harder to get jokes out of the appointment-TV concept. And the set-up clearly states that the miniseries airs during the week. “You have no life because you stay home on the weekend to watch TV”? That’s a burn. It’s a weak burn, but it’s got basis. “You have no life because you stay home on a weeknight to watch TV”? Not a burn. Not even a hangnail. Yeah, sci-fi fans stay home on weeknights. So does nearly everyone else who has to work the next day. And sure, sci-fi fans might watch Taken if it aired over the weekend…on TiVo, after a night of dressing snazzily and drinking martinis and getting laid, or whatever it is Mullen thinks sci-fi fans wouldn’t do because they like sci-fi and therefore do not have lives. Shut up, Mullen!

But Mullen never shuts up. And again I say, I don’t get it. By my accounting, he got off one legitimately good line in the fifteen attempts above. I could count the iffy ones, but then he’s still only batting .200. Even a shortstop can’t get away with batting .200 these days — could Pearlstine please just fire the guy already? Mullen sucks, okay? Sucks!

Mullen never sucks more than during the annual year-in-review “Hot Sheet” unfunny-vaganza every December, which I don’t mind telling you I dreaded when the December 20-27 issue hit my mailbox over the weekend. I will defend him again, sort of, by saying that he has to address the biggest stories of the year, many of which may have played out in the news cycle months ago and thus pose a challenge as comedy material even for a talented writer. Mullen, however…yeah. Christmas came early in the Tomato Nation household, though, when I opened the “Best Of” ish to find that a kindly soul on the editorial staff had confined Mullen to a mere ten items instead of his usual fifteen. But would he cram the suckage of fifteen items into the space of ten? Let’s find out.

“1. Winona The actress was found guilty of shoplifting at Saks in Beverly Hills. Don’t all big stars have personal assistants to do things like that for them?”

See above. I don’t envy him the Winona beat, as he’s had to churn out dozens of jokes at her expense in 2002. But Mullen’s signature lack of apparent effort is in play once again — a trip to the IMDb might have yielded a nugget or two in the Little Women’s Prison vein. Anyway, it’s not funny, but it’s not necessarily his fault.

“2. Tom Cruise’s braces Now that the Minority Report actor’s hideous teeth are fixed, he might finally be able to make it in the film business.”

Hey, two in a row that don’t totally suck. Another one that seems like it could stand punching up — Mouth Wide Shut? I don’t know — but Mullen doesn’t have much room here and he gets it done. Good usage, good tone. It’s not hilarious, but it’s fine.

“3. American Idol It gave the Fox network the money it needed to produce the high-quality, meaningful programs it’s always wanted to do. Like Fastlane.”

Characteristically pedestrian, and it points up yet another problem with Mullen’s “humor” — too general. The tightness of the format increases the difficulty, but a generalization is funnier when it’s next nailed down with details, and Mullen doesn’t do that enough (or very well, depending). Fox’s programming is historically one of the biggest, easiest targets in the business, and I’ve lined up more than a few cheap shots in that direction myself, but American Idol alone filled a barrel with fish and handed Mullen a gun, and he still missed. The dreadful auditions? The Paula Abdul? Hello? But no, Mullen fired on Fastlane instead, which isn’t a bad choice — the show isn’t Masterpiece Theatre — but the problem is that Fastlane is still on. It’s bad, but it’s airing. girls club, also a Fox offering, got sacked after two miserable episodes. World’s Wildest Police Videos lives in Self-Parodyville. The joke is too broad, and the specifics is does use don’t work as well as others would have.

“4. My Big Fat Greek Wedding The little $5 million indie has grossed more than a big fat $200 million. Enough for a lifetime supply of Windex.”

I haven’t seen the movie, and I’ve gotten so sick of the surrounding hype that I know almost nothing about it, by design, so the Windex joke may very well make sense, but I don’t get it. I will say that the “big fat Greek” punning in EW headlines and captions has got to go. Quit it, guys. Seriously. It’s so tired.

“5. Liza Minnelli Her wedding, her comeback. It’s just something she likes to do every few years.”

Of all the things Mullen could have said about Liza, he said…that? I suppose he’d already said everything else, but still. Even a weary “God, go away” is funnier than that.

“6. Olympics judges So they gave the gold medal to the wrong pair. It’s just figure skating. It’s not like it was a presidential election or something.”

Oy. Once again, he bungles the punchline by not pulling it off faster. Move “figure skating” up before “pair” and cut the whole sentence. Then it’s funny. Oh, wait. No, it’s not. It’s two years out of date. Shut up, Mullen.

“7. Spider-Man They’re already working on the sequel, in which he falls in love with the heroine of Charlotte’s Web.”

The only other crack I can imagine working is one referencing Arachnophobia, and that’s a stretch. The one Mullen uses is the only one that has a prayer, and he executes it precisely. It’s kind of disturbing, granted, if you think too deeply about what it would mean, but it’s a good joke.

“8. The Osbournes The anti-Ozzie and Harriet are still the surprise television hit of the year. It seems the family that swears together, stays together.”

It begged for a “Papa Don’t Preach” joke, that item. Not that that’s terribly funny either, but it beats what Mullen came up with instead. Of course, maybe he already used all the good lines in connection with the Osbourne family, but it’s another one that smacks of not trying very hard, and really, he gets paid to work through the pain.

“9. Martha Stewart The homemaking goddess changed her recipe for pound cake this year: Now it’s 1 cup butter, 1 cup sugar, 2 cups flour, 4 eggs, 1 pound shredded documents, 1 tsp baking powder, 2 tsp vanilla…”

Good idea, poor implementation. I give him credit for avoiding the “it’s a good thing” trap, but the list goes on too long and lets the air out of the joke. Two ingredients before the punchline, one after.

“10. Eminem A hit album and a hit movie. He’s an example to all kids that if you just put your mind to it, anyone can learn how to swear and mistreat women.”

Mullen, you had me, and then you lost me. I don’t really care for or about Eminem, granted, but…okay, I’ll pick the usage nits first. The pronoun inconsistency in the punchline is distracting. Sorry, but it’s not written well. Second of all, you use the parallel structure of “hit…hit” in the set-up, and then you mention mistreatment of women in the punchline — where’s the “hit” pun? It’s in poor taste, so maybe you tried to get it in there and your editor stomped it, but you can’t set it up like that if it’s not going anywhere. The rule of threes means we expect a third “hit,” but you leave us hanging. Bad form. But the real issue here is that, to the surprise of nobody, it’s just not funny, mostly because the swearing and the mistreating presumably predated Eminem’s success; shouldn’t it read more like “…if you just put your mind to it, you too can go far by swearing and mistreating women”? I mean, the swearing is not the goal; the swearing is one of the tools with which Eminem reached the goal. So in addition to unfunny, it’s also nonsensical. Wouldn’t a J.Lo comparison have gotten the job done? A line about the Eminem scent for a man and a woman? A crack about the success of 8-Mile and how next thing you know he’ll want to put a vanity record out?

You could argue that I expect too much of Jim Mullen, that nobody cares that much whether he’s not funny, or why, that it’s not designed to withstand such a vigorous picking-apart. But I care, because the guy gets paid to do a job, and if the job is to crack funny jokes, the job should go to someone else. I know funny. I work with funny. I see funny running rings around Jim Mullen with a cigarette in its teeth every day, and I certainly wouldn’t call myself the final word on humor writing, but I know what it ain’t, and it ain’t “Jim Mullen’s Hot Sheet.” You could also argue that I don’t know how challenging it is to come up with wisecracks about the same subjects over and over again, but believe me, I do. I didn’t get on base every time with the Van Der Beek forehead jokes, but I batted a lot better than .200, and so does Jessica. In fact, everyone on our staff has to find new ways to make fun of the same shows every week, and everyone on our staff kicks ass at it. Wing and F.U.N.K.L.E. have to do it all week on Fametracker, and they kick ass at that. The Daily Show does it. The Onion does it. It’s doable.

But not by Jim Mullen, so short his crappy “Sheet” already and give the job to Dalton Ross, now, today.

December 16, 2002

Share!